Great Moments in Diplomacy

McClatchy's Steven Thomma reports that things were tense at the G-20 meeting until Barack Obama stepped in to save the day. Listen and learn, grasshopper:

Heading into the summit's final hour [] it appeared that the group would fail to reach a consensus, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed to have the G-20 spotlight offending tax havens based on a list published Thursday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and China objected, largely because it doesn't belong to the OECD.

That was when Obama, long a champion of ending or curbing tax havens, decided to float a compromise and pulled Sarkozy aside....Obama proposed that the G-20 merely "take note" of the OECD list, thus opening the door to implicit but not direct endorsement of that list.

....Obama then met with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Sarkozy in a corner of the summit meeting room, as the other world leaders waited. Upon the trio's reaching agreement, the G-20 summit then agreed to note the list of tax havens.

I guess I shouldn't make fun of this stuff. The world is what it is. But seriously: today's big ruckus was about whether to "spotlight" tax havens or to merely "take note" of them? Jeebus.

Of course, this is all based on the word of an anonymous White House official who's got a vested interest in making Obama look like a diplomatic powerhouse. And this business of China objecting to an OECD list because it doesn't belong to the OECD is almost certainly bogus. (More likely it's because Macao and Hong Kong are tax havens and China isn't keen on having them cleaned up.) So who knows if this story is even true?

But it sounds disturbingly plausible. Of such stuff are diplomatic communiqués made.